It’s the first cyclone of the season on the east coast of Australia – or maybe the last of this summer’s cyclone season. Cyclone Alfred is a most unusual storm. Most cyclones are seen off Queensland’s northern coastline and the locals in Cairns, Townsville, Mackay and those parts are used to the big storms. They…
I wasn’t going to do a blog this week. Life’s been full of first world problems – first emptying, then ripping out the old kitchen and putting in a new one with new appliances. And while that was going on, online access was limited because (of course) the power had to be switched off on…
I’d love my blogs to be about innocent things like house renovations, the beach, wildlife, gardens. But sometimes what’s happening in the world grabs me and shakes me and makes me very, very angry – as well as worried about the future we’re leaving for the next generations. That’s particularly so with regard to the…
Progress is happening in our downsized house. We’re fixing all the things we didn’t notice when we bought the place. One of them is the lack of storage space. Or should I say the storage space was not well thought out. That was particularly true of the laundry. Like all of the rooms, it was…
One of the nice features of Facebook is that each day (under memories) it will show you all the posts you’ve made for all the years you’ve been with the platform. It’s fun looking back over the years. But increasingly I’ve noticed that there are fewer post in recent years and not as much engagement….
Unless you’ve just emerged from an untrackable wasteland somewhere I expect you’ll have encountered Artificial Intelligence of one form or another. It’s on phones, your car, on Facebook, in MS Word etc etc. And now a Chinese company has produced DeepSeek, its answer to ChatGPT. To me, it’s like so many Chinese endeavours. Take the…
While we’re waiting for work to start on the kitchen, bathroom, and laundry (not in that order) at our house Pete and I have been busy transforming the garden. The next three pictures are ‘before’ shots. After the chooks went to a much better home we brought in some raised garden beds and removed some…
The holiday period is over. There has been another attack on a Sydney synagogue with swastikas being painted on the walls. The perpetrators tried to set the place on fire, too. More and more it echoes the events in Germany in the nineteen thirties. It’s no surprise that anti-semitism has gathered pace since nothing was…
Time flies, doesn’t it? We’re already a week into 2025. In Australia that means we’re about halfway through the annual summer hiatus, where everything is on hold. All the TV shows are on holidays so you get endless repeats or ‘lifestyle’ programs like border security or real-time cop shows like RBT (random breath testing for…
Today we in Australia will experience the summer solstice – specifically, Saturday, 21 Dec 2024, 7:20 pm (approx) in Brisbane. It will be the longest day, with daylight for 13 hours and 41 minutes. At round about the same time, Europe will be enduring the winter solstice. London’s daylight hours will be 7 hours 49 minutes….